Friday, October 24, 2014

4.Seeing the Saffron Flag (Bhagwa Dhwaj), the entire history of the nation along with its
tradition and culture comes before our eyes. The mind rises and special
motivation comes in it. Only this Saffron Flag (Bhagwa Dhwaj) we consider as our Guru, as a symbol of our Tattva
i.e. principle. Sangh has regarded
the most sacred Bhagwa Dhwaj as the Guru instead of any particular individual.
The reason for this being that an individual may be a great person but he
cannot remain consistent in his life style nor can he be perfect in all
respects. Consequently, instead of making our position awkward by accepting any
individual person, we have adopted an inspirational symbol of victory and
strength, Bhagwa Dhwaj, as our guru. It represents our history, tradition and
supreme sacrifices made for our nation. It is the embodiment of all basic
elements of our nationhood.

The unique
strength of Hinduism lies in the institution of the Guru. Other religions only
refer to someone from the distant past as their ideal and reference point, but
Hinduism has living Gurus who dwell among us. These Gurus are human beings and
in some respects fallible, but they are many. Seen together, they correct each
other and they even these flaws out. So, in a way, there is nothing wrong with
the Gurus’ humanity and there was no need for replacing them with a uniform
symbol. Then again, for a collective, where each member may have a different
Guru, it might be symbolically apt to represent them collectively by the
saffron colour.

5.Bhagwa Dhwaj is not
Sangh’s own creation. Nor, it has any intention of creating a separate flag.
Sangh has only accepted the Bhagwa Dhwaj,
which for thousands of years has been the flag of our Rashtra Dharma.Bhagwa Dhwaj
has a long history and tradition and it is an embodiment of Hindu culture.

The saffron
flag was best known, certainly in Hedgewar’s Maharashtra, as Shivaji’s flag.
But Shivaji too only had it from tradition. Every Hindu knows that “saffron”,
meaning orange, the colour of fire, is the colour of the Vedic sacrifice (Yajña), of “heat” (tapas) or asceticism, and hence of Dharma.

Drawing on the
website of the Vishva Hindu Parishad of America (section: “Who is a Hindu?”),
we can say that the Bhagwa Dhwaj “is the
eternal symbol of Hindu culture and Dharma” adorning every ashram, every
temple, the army of Chatrapati Shivaji, Guru Gobind Singh, etc. It stands
for Dharma, wealth, advancement,
glory, knowledge and detachment. The orange colour of the flag is the
colour of fire, the great
purifier, the eternal witness of all Yajñas,
inspiring the greatest of all human values, sacrifice, the very essence of
Hindu Dharma. The colour reminds us of the orange hue around the rising Sun dispelling
darkness, beckoning us to shake off our lethargy (Arise, Awake!) and get down
to our duties. The Sun burns throughout the day, silently sacrificing itself,
thereby giving life to all creatures on this planet, without demanding anything
in return. And as it sets, it teaches us to have no expectations, no regrets;
just to render service to all creatures ceaselessly.

The flag’s shape consists of two triangles: the upper
being shorter than the lower one. The triangles represent the rising flames of
the burning fire. The flames rise upwards only -- those rising from the bottom
being the longest. They teach us to "rise above and become better always".
Another significance of this shape is diversity, acceptance, harmony and mutual
respect. The small and the large portions remind us that duality, contrast,
inequality, diversity are inevitable. For harmonious existence there must be
sharing, respect and cooperation - the burden must always be on the big to
support the small.

According to the VHPA, “the Bhagwa has been the silent
witness of our long history. In its folds resides the images, the memories, the
tapas of our ancestors, our Rishis,
our Mothers. It is our greatest Guru, our Guide, inspiring us forever to live
the life full of sublime virtues based on sacrifice, dedication, purity and
service.”

6.
There are excellent scriptures in our religion. Very inspiring valour-filled
history is behind us. But we do not think on it in the right way. When we see a
thoughtful and working person, we put him in the line of divine people. We
assume him as divine, and tell ourselves that it is impossible for man to
inculcate God’s virtues. With such an imaginary idea, we do not try to imitate
and acquire the divine virtues.

7.If we keep Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj as our ideal,
we will remember his heroics for the cause of defending Hindudom. The samarthya i.e. power of Shivaji is as
much as that of the Saffron Flag. The history we remember looking at the
saffron flag, and the motivation we get from it, the same is got from Shivaji
Maharaj’s life. Shivaji lifted the saffron flag which was truly in the dust,
re-established Hindu Pad-padshahi and
rejuvenated the dying Hindutva. So, if you want to keep a man as ideal, then
keep Shivaji as the one.

Pad-padshahi is Persian
and means “sovereignty”. Padeshah, “emperor”,
was the title of the ruler of the Moghul Empire, against which Shivaji rose up.
Shivaji was a very inspiring example, particularly for freedom fighters. For Hedgewar’s
generation, their struggle against the British Empire found in Shivaji’s
struggle against an earlier empire a logical precedent.

But for us,
looking at this episode from a distance, the limitations of this imagery become
better visible. Shivaji was a towering example of a chivalrous and uniquely successful
warrior, especially needed in an age of oppression. But Hindu history has known
other ages, and its genius shone most when it could concentrate on the creative
arts. Secularists posing as Hindus, or indeed secularists who haven’t grown
away too far from their Hindu roots, pull the Hindu nationalists’ legs when
they say that “their” Hinduism doesn’t start with Shivaji, but with the
Upanishadic seer Yajñavalkya, who launched the fundamental concept of Self (Atman), or even Vedic seers like
Vasishtha, Vishvamitra and Dirghatamas. They have a point, for Shivaji wouldn’t
have been inspired to champion Hinduism if these seers hadn’t created a worthwhile
civilization to begin with.

8.Happiness of Hindus is the happiness of my family and me.
The problems faced by Hindu society are our problems and its humiliation is our
humiliation. Such feeling of belonging should be in every Hindu. This is the
basis of Hindu Dharma.

The
nationalist movements of 19th-century Europe always insisted on
awakening the individual members of the nation to a feeling of oneness with the
rest of the nation, and hence to solidarity with every section of the nation.
Here we find the same sentiment applied by a freedom fighter to Hindu society
conceived as a nation.

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

A major and
long-awaited project has been brought to completion. The 11-volume Encyclopedia of Hinduism, with a
foreword by Dr. Karan Singh, is the brainchild of the India Heritage Research Foundation
and Swami Chidananda Saraswati of Paramartha Niketan. In its 25-year long
gestation, first Prof. K.L. Seshagiri Rao and then Prof. Kapil Kapoor served as
its general editor. Kapoor also wrote an in-depth introduction. The 11-volume encyclopedia
contains contributions by over 1500 scholars in over 7500 articles. These deal
with saints, kings, heroes, arts and crafts, temples, pilgrimages, philosophies
and concepts. They also give some space to meritorious Indologists and to
foreigners inspired by Hindu thought and culture, from ancient Chinese to
modern American. Most persons, temples and festivals are illustrated with
photographs or paintings. An index, absent in many other encyclopedias, allows
you to find any significant term in each of the articles.

Specialists of
each department of the vast domain of Hinduism might find fault with the compressed
way their pet subject gets treated, but completeness is not of this world. The
articles constitute good introductions to their topics, and the truly
interested reader is invited to proceed from there. At least he is not being
misled by gross mistakes, as would be the case with the many flawed
contributions on easily the most-consulted source, Wikipedia. That might be a
decent source on neutral topics like physics, but on Hindu subjects it is
emphatically not recommended by the specialists. Nor is any contributor to the Encyclopedia of Hinduism grossly biased;
they are truer to its scholarly ethic of being a neutral and non-controversial
source of information. This, again, will come as a pleasant surprise for those
who rely too much on Wikipedia, where many topics of serious debate have been
hijacked by one of the contending parties, shutting the other’s party’s version
out or ridiculing it. In the present case, we are dealing with a real scholarly
work.

Accuracy

An evident criterion for scholarliness is: how does the work deal with
certainties, probabilities and uncertainties? Are they properly reflected, or
are they all replaced with a quasi-religious certainty? Generally, factual
uncertainty is simply conceded, e.g. the entry Vikramaditya says: “Conflicting
theories have been put forward by historians regarding the real origin of King Vikramditya
and his dynasty.” Chronology is a major problem in Hindu history, and this is
frankly admitted: “Tiruvalluvar’s age is also not known properly. There are different viewpoints.” The
entry Shankaracharya primarily dates Shankara’s birth to the 8th
century, as accepted by the Orientalists, but also mentions that some of his
followers place his birth around 500 BC, though implying a clear preference for
the former option. On the
origins of the Vedic people, the entry Arya simply gives the existing theories.
One of these is the contentious Aryan Invasion Theory, which is correctly
treated as still a valid contender, but juxtaposed with rival theories. This
instills confidence in the reader, for when uncertainty is conceded, it seems
to mean that when certainty is assumed, the explanation given has indeed been
corroborated by the latest research.

Given the numerous contributors, however, they are not all equally
rigorous. A few times an author proves a bit too eager to embrace an insufficiently
proven hypothesis, e.g. the Sanatana Dharma entry mentions as fact that the
Mayas in Central and the Incas in South America had borrowed much from the
Hindus. While this need not be impossible, it is at least controversial. An
encyclopedia is not the place to launch daring theories, it should just
summarize the non-contentious information agreed upon by the experts.

Sometimes a
defect in one entry is compensated by the hoped-for information under another entry.
The Caturyuga entry (the Four World Ages) simply gives the usual Puranic story
believed by most Hindus, with the world ages having astronomical time-spans,
without asking any questions. Thus, the hypothesis that the Caturyuga, though a
very ancient concept available among non-Indian peoples as well, later got filled
in with a numerical value which coincidentally approximates the precession
cycle of less than 26,000 years, is not discussed at all. Yet, this hypothesis
is in tune with all we know about the Indian reception and elaboration of the
Hellenistic discovery of precession, i.e. the cycle which the constellations
make vis-à-vis the equinox. It is not merely an invention by the much-lambasted
Orientalists, it was also opined in writing by, for instance, Sri Yuktesvar in
1894. However, the entry Yuga does give a more historical account, specifying
for example that in the late-Vedic Vedanga Jyotisha, the word still meant a
period of five years, a much more modest magnitude than in the Puranas. The
entry Dvapara Yuga specifies how the jump from manageable time-spans (with the
four ages spanning 12,000 years, or roughly half of the precession cycle) to
the Puranic astronomical time-spans was made: the years were interpreted as
“divine years” and hence multiplied by 360.

A few plain
mistakes have also managed to pass the editorial sieve. Thus, the entry Sahasrara
Chakra, “thousand-spoked wheel”, speaks of the “Shatachakra Nirupana”, which
means “investigation of the hundred wheels”, but this classic 16th-century
sourcebook about the chakras is actually called the Shatchakra Nirupana, “investigation
of the six wheels”.

So, this work still
has to be handled with care, yet it is a treasure-trove of information. In this
review, we focus on potentially controversial points, but most users will be
more interested in the biographies of saints, the history of philosophical
schools or the description of temples, and these make up the bulk of this work.

Sectarianism

There are,
however, three subtler or more implicit dangers for this type of project. One
is Hindu sectarianism: many contributors have pledged allegiance to one
particular sect, and this might shine through. In a number of “Hinduism”
schoolbooks used in England and Holland which the present writer has
evaluated,it was found that while the authors
certainly had toned down their sectarian biases, still their allegiances often
remained visible. Thus, a description of Shiva or Saraswati as a “demi-god” was
a give-away of ISKCON (Hare Krishna) theology, while a reduction of the many
gods to “different manifestations of the one God” betrayed an Arya Samaj
viewpoint. That need not be a problem, but in the case of an encyclopedia,
readers might hold it up for criticism.

In the present
work, this tendency seems to have been avoided. Presumably, the different sects
and their doctrines and temples have been described each by its own votaries,
who had no axe to grind against it. Instead, and understandably, some articles
seem to reflect modern scholarly theories to the exclusion of others. Thus, the
entry Vishvamitra gives a particular account of the Vedic “Battle of the Ten
Kings” (viz. putting the Bharata dynasty among the Vedic king Sudas’s
enemies)that is popular in university
courses because it applies the Aryan invasion scenario; but it is not really
supported by the original Vedic report, and therefore would not be accepted by
a dissenting school of thought.Even
this modern sectarianism is kept to a minimum, though. Thus, the entry Hindu
Eras simply juxtaposes the different interpretations of the existing calendar
systems or the different dates attributed to the Mahabharata war.

The borders of Hinduism

Another problem
might be what is not treated. Thus,
many North-Indian Hindus have never heard of the ancient Tamil grammar Tolkappiyam
or the poet Tiruvalluvar. While they might have heard of the Chola empire or
the Virashaiva sect, it often doesn’t really form part of their Hindu
consciousness. When it comes to traditions that the Christian missionaries
insist on calling “not Hindu”, especially the Indian “Scheduled Tribes”, we
find that many Hindus equally treat them as not part of their own fold. Not that
they will openly describe the Tribals as un-Hindu, but they don’t actively
include them in their mental horizon. If this encyclopedia wants to be
considered a compendium of all available knowledge on Hinduism, then it should
include these borderline communities as well – or write them definitively off
as not belonging to the Hindu fold.

South India is
sufficiently included: each of the Dravidian names and terms mentioned has an
ample entry. Many lesser saints and temples are also dealt with. On the tribal
front, the picture is less systematic, more haphazard. There is a entry
Thang-ta (“sword-spear”) for the martial art of Manipur, of which even theexistence is probably known only to very few
readers. On the other hand, an important term like Sarna, “sacred grove”, the
physical centre of worship for the Tribes of the Chotanagpur plateau, is
absent. Sacred trees are still common in popular Hinduism, and connect with the
open-air fire rituals in the Vedic age, different from the later temple
worship. But then, the entry Santal, the name of one of these tribes, does give
a lengthy account of their religious practices centred around the Bongas,
roughly equivalent to the Devas. It also mentions the “sacred grove”. Similarly,
there are entries like Hill People of Tamil Nadu, and much information about
the Tribals is also indirectly given in entries like Ritual Arts and Crafts of
Arunachal Pradesh.

As for
Christianity and Islam, their interference with Hinduism is given practically
no attention. One article deals with Hindu-Christian interaction, but
otherwise, Hindu civilization as subject-matter for an encyclopedia is already
big enough. Thus, the entry Ayodhya deals with the place’s temples, famous
characters and significance for the Hindus, but pays only minimal attention to
the temple/mosque conflict that became front-page news across the world. Most
Muslim stalwarts, including the main persecutors of unbelievers and destroyers
of temples, are simply not mentioned. The 17th-century Moghul prince
Dara Shikoh has an entry, but that is because he tried to integrate Hinduism
into a state syncretism (which never durably materialized because Dara was
killed by his more orthodox brother Aurangzeb) and translated the Upanishads
into Persian. This translation was then rendered into French and triggered a
first wave of European enthusiasm for Hinduism.

Telescope effect

A third danger
apparent in too many Hindu writings on Hinduism (and most of the authors here are
indeed practising Hindus) is the “telescope effect”, viz. that phenomena from
very different eras are all seen on a one-dimensional canvas, the past,
routinely called the “Vedic” age. Thus, the properly Vedic astrology, the
determination of auspicious times on the basis of the 28 lunar asterisms, tends
to get conflated with the imported Hellenistic horoscopy based on the 12-part
Zodiac, advertised in numerous books as “Vedic”.

There is an
insufficient realization that institutions and concepts also have a history. Many
entries are given the definition that “tradition holds” or that is
“traditionally believed”. But it is the job of an encyclopedia to be critical
vis-à-vis what is generally believed. Thus, the word Upanishad is traditionally
explained as “sitting down at the feet (of the Guru)”. This may even be true,
but it seems that the entry Upanishad ought to have mentioned the dissidence
among modern scholars, who think that it means “metaphor”.

This need for
historicity may concern major topics of Hindu history, such as the caste
system. Among enemies of Hinduism, it is common to project caste at its worst
onto the entire Hindu past, then to conclude that “caste is intrinsic to
Hinduism”. What is meant here is the hoped-for death of Hinduism itself: “If we
want to abolish caste, we have to destroy Hinduism itself.” Though this is a
life-and-death issue for Hinduism, we find that many unthinking Hindus espouse
this same projection, perhaps because in the glory days of caste, it was
equally upheld as eternal and unchanging. But the scholarly finding is that it
has indeed changed. Caste in the age of the Ṛg-Vedic “Family Books”, India’s
oldest documents, was non-existent, or at least never mentioned. Later it was
understood to be hereditary though only in the fatherly line, and for the last
two thousand years, it was the boxed-in endogamous institution that we have
come to know.

Moreover, the
Western term “caste” conflates two very different concepts known to all Hindus:
Varna, “colour/category”, the four classes typical of any complex society, with
counterparts in other cultures; and Jati, “birth-group”, the thousands of
endogamous communities, an institution stretching deep into tribal society and
largely existing even among Indian Christians and Muslims. When tribes were
integrated into expanding Vedic society, they were allowed to retain their
distinctive mores and especially the continuation of their separateness through
endogamy. Thus, as low-caste leader Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar observed, tribes became castes. This was an
application of the principle of non-violence: integration without hurting the
pre-existing group identity. The entry Caste vaguely nods towards this
principle of historicity, and it gives examples of how people in the Vedic age
chose their own professions regardless of what their families had been doing.
But it might have discussed the need for historicity more pointedly, especially
as this topic is so controversial and much in need of clarification.

An example of this
illusion of an unchanging institution is that many Hindus know the Vedic sages
Vishvamitra and Vasishtha only through their adventures in a Puranic story
where the quarrel between them is explained in caste terms. It should be
understood that these caste considerations are completely absent in the sages’
original Rig-Vedic appearances. This later addition of the caste angle is satisfactorily
explained under the entry Vishvamitra.

For another
example: according to the entry Asura, the Family Books call the dragon Vritra
an Asura, a term which had not yet acquired a negative connotation. But he is
also described as a Brahmin, at least according to the younger epic the Mahabharata,
which applies the law that people had to do penance for the sin of killing a
Brahmin, to the Vritra-slayer Indra. This is apparently a projection of Rama’s
penance for killing the Brahmin Ravaṇa. Here, the primary mention of Vritra in
the Rig-Veda should have been clearly distinguished from the later elaboration
in the Epics, which drag in an anachronistic caste angle. It seems that the
final editing of the Epics coincided with the promotion of caste to a central
feature of Hinduism.

Accounting for change

We discern in the
foreword a learned version of what most Hindus nowadays will tell you when
asked to describe their religion. And indeed, this text nicely illustrates what
the problem is. By summarizing the main traits of Hinduism, it at once shows
the pitfalls in an enterprise like this: it doesn’t sufficiently realize that
the basic Hindu concepts have a history too, the South-Indian and Tribal
traditions are conspicuous by their absence, and Hinduism gets reduced to one
(admittedly large and normative) of its forms, viz. the Vedic or Brahmanical
lineage.

Thus, it lists
four Purusharthas or goals of life in Hinduism. These lists appear in numerous
Hindu catechism books and introductory works. Yet, if we apply the exacting
standards of an encyclopedia, this is only partly true. Originally there were
only three goals of life: Kama/sensuality, Artha/lucre and Dharma/ethics. The
latter category included all religion-related activities, everything that deals
with the relation of the part (the individual) with the whole (the universal).
There was no notion of Mukti or Moksha, “liberation”, yet. That didn’t appear
until the Upanishads, and was elevated to a goal of life only after
liberation-centric Buddhism became popular. An encyclopedia must give an
account of this history, against the unhistorical tendency among contemporary
believers to absolutize the fourfold scheme with which they happen to be
familiar.

Similarly, among
the stages of life (Ashramas) there were originally only three: as pupil
devoted to knowledge, as householder and pillar of society, and as an elderly man
withdrawing into the forest, literally or figuratively. The best-known example
of the latter stage is when the Seer Yajnavalkya ends his married life and launches
the all-important doctrine of the Self in a farewell speech to his wife Maitreyi.
The category of Sannyas, renunciation, did not exist yet. The difference with
the third stage, Vanaprastha, “forest-dweller”, is that the latter came after
the householder stage while Sannyas replaced the householder stage altogether.
It implied asceticism not as a stage of life but as a lifelong vocation and was
marked by specific rituals which an aging family man did not undergo. It was practised
by the Munis, mentioned in the Ṛg-Veda
in the third person as marginal wanderers, definitely distinct from the Vedic Seers
themselves, who were court-priests or otherwise members of an elite in the
centre of society. But then prince Siddhartha Gautama, patronized by the kings
and rich magnates, created his own very successful sect of celibate monks. Only
in those new circumstances, at least according to modern scholarship, did the
Brahmin establishment feel the need to integrate their lifestyle of Sannyas as
a fourth life stage. Even then, a moment’s reflection will show that this
“stage” sat uneasily next to that of Vanaprastha.

The foreword also
lists four types of Yoga, just as you will find in the works of Swami
Vivekananda. Most Hindus nowadays will agree that there is Karma-yoga, Jnana-yoga
and Bhakti-yoga, as well as Raja-yoga. In theBhagavad-Gita, the first three are called Karma-marga, “the path
of action”; Jnana-marga, “the path of knowledge”; and Bhakti-marga, “the path
of devotion”. They are not called yoga, and certainly not the high-definition
yoga described in Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra: “Yoga is the stopping of the mind’s
motions” (which this encyclopedia, following Vivekananda, equates with Raja-yoga).
The Gita did not pretend that Bhakti, the loving concentration on a divine
person different from oneself, is a form of self-immersion, which Yoga is.
Indeed, the foreword elsewhere quotes the Bhakti poet Kabir as writing that Yoga
is of no use. Not that either Yoga or Bhakti is bad for you, but they are
different from one another. Reliance on a god is different from reliance on
oneself. This used to be well understood, for instance in the 16th-century
polemic between the Bhakti master Guru Nanak and the Nath Yogis. It is a sign
of the increasing illiteracy in Hinduism among modern Hindus (a problem
aggravated by secularist education) that the two are conflated into “Bhakti-yoga”.
A conceptually precise encyclopedia should be welcomed as a tool for setting
the record straight.

The foreword is
an interesting starting-point. It is no big deal that, for instance, it takes
the Aryan invasion for granted, the scenario that most Hindus were spoon-fed
throughout the colonial and Nehruvian age, although it has recently become
controversial. But in the body of the encyclopedia proper, we expect (and
usually find) higher standards. In its handling of Hindu concepts it should be
critical rather than pious. Otherwise it would only be an oversized catechism.

So, how do these
threefolds or fourfolds fare in this encyclopedia? The article on Purushartha
defines these as the “four goals of life”, but then separates Dharma, Artha and
Kama as the Trivarga, the “division in three”. It locates these in the
empirical world, whereas Moksha is said to deal with the spiritual world. The
threefold scheme is mentioned, but not sufficiently done historical justice to;
its primacy is not explained. This way, we see a compromise between the
scholarly, objective approach and that of the contemporary believers. This
pattern repeats itself throughout this encyclopedia under many of the
controversial, historically eventful or ideology-laden entries. Don’t expect
any lambasting of conventional schemes or merciless historicizing of commonly
used concepts, the approach that many Western Indologists take pride in. On the
other hand, in most cases the facts the reader will need are indeed given, but
only in passing, without any emphasis. Admittedly, in a project of this
magnitude, there is no room for emphasis.

Arya, Dasa, Asura

Arya is defined
as “noble”, its classical meaning, but also as the self-referential term of the
Vedic Aryans, its Vedic meaning. This is entirely correct, though the latter
meaning could have been clarified further by stating that the Hittites and
Iranians also referred to themselves by related words. This way, everyone used
it in the sense of “us” as against “them”. It was originally a relative ethnic
term, with the Iranians considering all others including the Vedic people as
“them”. One man’s Arya is another man’s Anarya, and vice versa. In India, as
the Vedic tribe (the Pauravas and their subtribe, the Bharatas) became
identified with the word Arya, this term came to mean “Vedic”, “civilized”, and
hence “noble”, as opposed to the uncultured people who had not been exposed to
the Vedic tradition. So, what the text of the encyclopedia says is faultless,
but to remove all doubt in the reader’s mind, a bit more information would have
been helpful.

Dasa, nowadays
“servant”, very clearly referred to the Iranians, as did Dasyu, Pani, and
probably Shudra. The first three have Iranian equivalents and are known in
Iranian contexts from Greek and Iranian sources. The Rig-Veda describes them as
“without Indra”, “without fire-sacrifice” and other known characteristics of
the Mazdean (Zoroastrian) tradition. It is rank nonsense to assert that these
terms have anything to do with “dark-skinned natives”, as the Aryan Invasion
Theory has inculcated in far too many people. Here, most Hindus including the
authors under discussion are too defensive and fail to assert the Iranian
origin of the words which later came to mean “servile class”. The entry Dasa
only starts out with the common meaning of “servant”, then dilates upon its
figurative religious meaning (as in the name Ramdas, “servant of Rama”), but
doesn’t give any information on the word’s origins. This is already defective
from a scholarly viewpoint, and it is also politically unwise, for the enemy
has lost no time to propagate the notion that the “Dasas are the natives
reduced to slavery by the Aryan invaders”. In their dominant discourse, the
fact that Hindus ignore this claim merely shows “Brahminical hypocrisy”.

Similarly, the
term Asura again refers to the Iranians. At first, Asura was virtually a
synonym with Deva, as correctly observed here. But by the time of the Rig-Veda’s
tenth and youngest book, after the war with the Iranians (Battle of the Ten
Kings and Varshagira battle, the latter featuring Zarathushtra’s patron king Vishtaspa),
the two terms had ethnically grown apart: Deva meant “deity” for the Indians,
“devil” for the Iranians; and with Asura/Ahura, it was the reverse. In war
psychology, everything relating to the Iranians was demonized. By the time the
two sides became friends again, the term Asura had frozen in its meaning of
“demon”, and became associated with all kinds of enemies or evils unrelated to
its original ethnic connotations.

Separate sects

Another
criterion for evaluating a work on Hinduism with scholarly pretentions is: does
it account for the vexed question whether Buddhism, Sikhi (as Sikhs call Sikhism)
etc. are part of Hinduism or are separate religions? Politicians and half-baked
intellectuals treat Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism and the tribal traditions as
separate religions, whether out of the calculation that being nice to the
separatist lobbies pays on election day, or out of sheer anti-Hindu animus. Anti-Hindu
policies have even driven the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission into
claiming non-Hindu status. Yet, a truly historical view would treat them all as
just so many sects within the sectarian continuum called Hinduism.

Here, the
picture is very mixed. Implicitly, the continuity between these sects and
developments within Hinduism is asserted in many articles. Thus, the entry Alara
Kalama factually describes this teacher’s importance in the Buddha’s meditative
career: the technique he taught led the Buddha to keep practicing meditation
(while abandoning the self-mortification which other teachers had made him do)
and to develop the Vipassana (“mindfulness”) technique that gave him Liberation.
The Buddha made his own version of Hinduism, as any Hindu Guru is entitled to,
and as arch-Hindus like the Vedic Seer Dirghatamas before him or the
philosopher Shankara after him have also done. But he never broke away from any
existing religion. On the contrary, when he was asked near the end of his life
what the secrets of a stable society are, he mentioned among other things the
continued respect for the existing sages, pilgrimages and (by definition
pre-Buddhist) sacred places.

Likewise,
central concepts of Sikhi are properly derived from ancient Hindu concepts,
e.g. the mantra So’ham (“I am He”, viz. He who lives in the sun) has Vedic
origins but reappears in glory in Sikh scripture and practice. The entry Dasham
Granth recounts how the last Sikh Guru Govind Singh had stories from the Puranas
translated for his flock. It hardly makes sense to argue this point further,
for there are literally hundreds of indications for the view that Sikhi is just
one among the many Hindu traditions. A scholar sometimes has to speak truth to
power and say unpleasant things merely because he has found them to be true. In
this case, no matter how politically desirable it may seem to play along with
Sikh separatism, the historical facts say with one voice that Sikhi is but a Hindu
sect. Treating the Sikh Gurus as non-Hindu is completely anachronistic: none of
them ever realized that he was the leader of a new religion separate from
Hinduism. Even Guru Nanak’s utterance: “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim”,
falsely interpreted by separatists as an abdication from Hinduism, is a
typically Hindu thing to say. In Islam, religious identity is everything: it
decides whether you go to heaven (if Muslim) or to hell (if non-Muslim). By
contrast, in Hinduism, it may mean something in this world but nothing
ultimately: your Mukti or Liberation does not depend on what community you belong
to, but whether you practise the spiritual path. When Mahatma Gandhi took an
anti-identitarian position: “I am a Hindu, I am a Muslim, I am a Christian, I
am a Sikh”, his opponent Mohammed Ali Jinnah rightly commented: “That is a
typically Hindu thing to say.”

Then again, some
of the entries concerning the Sikh Gurus or the holy places of the Sikh sect do
speak of “Sikhs and Hindus”. The fact itself that they figure in an Encyclopedia of Hinduism militates sufficiently
against the Sikh separatist position, but the editors have not wanted to press
the point. Purists might say that they lapse into politicians’ talk, a
concession to the recent and British-created phenomenon of Sikh separatism. But
in fact it was wise to accommodate this separateness to some extent. Firstly,
it is a matter of politeness, e.g. Muslims entirely follow the precedent
behaviour or Mohammed and hence could sensibly be called Mohammedans, but as
they themselves prefer to be called Muslims, we just go along and use that
term. Secondly, an encyclopedia has to care about its reputation, which
directly impacts on its capacity to function as an authoritative source of
information. If it bluntly said: “Sikhs are Hindus”, then it would be decried
in many influential places as “Hindu chauvinist” or worse.

At any rate, if
so many sects and individuals declare that “we are not Hindu”, it is not
because they have doctrines or practices that are incompatible with Hinduism –
this encyclopedia amply shows they are entirely embedded in Hindu history. It
is only because Hinduism has lately acquired a bad name and is under attack
from many sides, a situation that drives people away. This cannot be countered
by Hindus insisting: “But you are Hindus!” The editorial decision not to make
an issue of this is therefore a correct one. But the day Hinduism wins back its
glory, these sects will all come flocking to the winner and thump their chests:
“We are Hindus too! We are better Hindus than you!”

Conclusion

After surveying
this encyclopedia, our judgment must be that it is a great, useful and
necessary enterprise, but marred to a small extent by typically Hindu flaws. It
admirably avoids the pitfalls of sectarianism and Indo-Aryan chauvinism, and
greatly limits the telescope effect of equalizing all time-depths to just “the
past”. Indeed, the problem ofanachronism is much less serious than you’d fear when reading the kind
of missives put out by “internet Hindus”. The latter’s defective sense of
time-depth reaches ridiculous heights which anti-Hindu academics love to
highlight, e.g. the claim that the Aryan migration of some five thousand years
ago is the same as the spread of mankind from India northward more than fifty
thousand years ago; or the claim that Rama lived a million years ago yet spoke the
very same language that grammarians codified less than three thousand years ago;
or the claim that “ancient Hindus conquered the world”. Those pitfalls are
completely avoided here. The sober facts about Hinduism make his civilization
outstanding enough, it doesn’t need these comical assertions.

The project was
started at the fag end of the age of printing. Soon after, the Encyclopedia Britannica decided to drop
its print edition and go exclusively online. It is fortunate that Hindus just
made it with their printed encyclopedia. Future generations won’t care anymore,
but our generation still values a book more if it has appeared in print. To
gain a foothold in the world of books as a solid reference, this printed
version was necessary. On the other hand, for future editions it probably
stands to reason that they will appear only online (the present review was done
on a pdf copy rather than the 11 paper tomes). The advantage will be that any
newinformation can speedily be added,
and that any rare mistakes can be corrected forthwith.

The importance
of this work in a Hindu self-reassertion is that Hindus have at last decided to
speak for themselves. Whereas outsiders like Wendy Doniger can only speak of
Hinduism in caricatures, here Hindus have given an account of their own understanding
of their civilization. What we ourselves do, we do better.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

The ShivGanga NGO, independent from the usual
Missionary or Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (the Hindu nationalist tribal front)
networks, has come about as an answer to the Jhabua district's grave water
problems, which made life difficult for the local Bhil/Bilala tribals. Basing
material self-reliance on cultural self-respect, the movement makes use of the
tribals' own cultural resources to motivate them for village development. So,
for "harvesting" water, it lets the villagers take inspiration from
the myth of Shiva's blessings to Bhagirath bringing the Ganga down to earth,
applying each of its motifs to the various aspects of development, e.g.
labelling the required technology as Jata (Shiva's matted hair). It is one of
the more successful among tribal development schemes.

Jhabua is a tribal-dominated district in
westernmost Madhya Pradesh. Unlike some tribes who lived in isolation until
recently and were culturally quite distinct from Hindu society, the Bhil and
Bilala tribes (more than 87% of Jhabua's population), living near the Vedic
heartland, have been in touch with the Brahmanical culture since Mahabharata
times. As a consequence, their religion is partly specific to them, partly
generally Hindu. There is also a Christian minority, though the process of
conversions has largely stopped. The tribals have a profound cultural heritage,
including religious and social rituals, traditions, arts, crafts and human
values.

During the British Raj and after
Independence, there has been a systematic effort to culturally neglect and
economically exploit this innocent population. A tangible problem for the
population is the paucity of water, with lowering underground water levels and
the waste of otherwise opulent rain water (+900 mm/year) making life ever more
difficult. Most of the rain water is drained out because of the hilly terrain
and rocky soil, leaving the area dry for 6-8 months of a year. The major hurdle
in the development of that region is the non availability of water for
cultivation and other purposes, partly due to deforestation. As there is no
provision to retain this rain water, the villagers who are basically small
cultivators can take only one crop a year. As there is no other source of income,
hundreds of thousands of villagers have to displace themselves temporarily to
neighboring cities to work as labourers for their livelihood. This aggravates
the problem of the children's lack of education, poor
health care facilities and other social evils.

The Shivganga Samagra Gramvikas Parishad
(SSGP, Shivganga All-Round Village Development Council) makes use of the
tribals' own cultural resources to motivate them to develop. It seeks to establish social leadership of young trained development
workers from among the locals during cultural and traditional festivals.
Training is given in 3-day camps locally and 7-day camps in the nearby cities
of Indore and Bhopal (Vananchal Sashaktikaran Varga), making them Paramarthi-s
("spiritual leaders"). They learn village organization, setting up
cultural activities, and how to identify and solve problems; so far reaching
6000 youth from 700 villages. Advanced training consists of visits to the
Police Station, Court, various offices etc., to learn how to deal with officialdom.
Gifted youngsters are given further training at an engineering college in
Indore. Consequently, they, along with villagers decide their developmental
priorities and work together. Thus the motivated villagers join SSGP and
conduct developmental activities like constructing water bodies, organizing
training camps for skill development, organic farming etc. For mass awareness
and education, village libraries are established.

The result is that Gram (village)
engineers, in consultation with the villagers, make a plan of rainwater
conservation and rainwater harvesting. The villagers take an oath to work
voluntarily for water conservation. During the months of April and May,
thousands of villagers joins hands to work together for over two months continuously.
A Jalayatra ("foot march for water") is organized every year in
Jhabua to increase the awareness of the need for water conservation and
harvesting. Thousands of tribals march on foot around the city with geti
(pickaxe) and favda (shovel) to motivate other people to work for water
conservation. A yearly event of coming together and working together for rain
water harvesting called Halma is being organized since 2010 at Hatipawa hills,
Jhabua.In 2010 more than 1500 volunteers, in 2011 more than 8000 village
volunteers and in 2012 more than 12000 volunteers worked together, with the
inspiration of Parmartha Bhava ("spirituality”).

The SSGP is independent from the usual
Missionary or Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (the Hindu nationalist tribal front)
networks, and receives no money from abroad. It is exclusively rooted in
Western Madhya Pradesh, i.e. Jhabua itself and the nearby Indore area.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has
launched the term “Islamophobia”, which was immediately adopted by the US, the
EU, academic bodies like the American Academy of Religion, and then the media
and the chattering classes in the West, in India and elsewhere. Its users
translate it as “hatred of Islam” but it really means “fear of Islam”. It
treats warnings against the threat Islam poses to rival convictions as well as
to freedom and democracy as a psychic disease on a par with claustrophobia
(fear of closed spaces) or arachnophobia (irrational fear of spiders). It is an
excellent way to poison the debate by declaring your enemies insane. In reply,
we will coin the term “Islamophilia”. Being more generous and open-minded than
our opponents, we have not chosen a psychiatric term to designate them. Like
francophilia, “love of everything French”, it is merely a descriptive term:
love of Islam. We consider this love irrational, but do not include an
intrinsic irrationality in the term chosen. Someone who whitewashes Islam or
shields it from criticism is an “Islamophile”.

When George Bush spoke to the American
people after the bomb attacks of 11 September 2001, he told them to assemble in
their churches, their synagogues and
their mosques. He made it a point to emphasize that the Muslim Americans
too were part of the nation. The revenge invasion of Afghanistan that he was
planning, would merely be a “war on terror”, not a war on Islam. Meanwhile,
American politicians fell over each other to be seen visiting mosques or
celebrating Iftar parties. No, this was not a war on Islam, eventhough American
and British soldiers were killing Muslims in Afghanistan and later in Iraq by
the thousands. Every next bombing in or invasion of Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan,
Libya, Mali and again Iraq would be accompanied by vows of: “Islam is the
religion of peace”, “Islamic State (of Iraq and al-Sham) is not the true
Islam”, nay, “IS are monsters, not Muslims”. George Bush, Barack Obama, John
Kerry, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Nicholas Sarkozy, François Hollande, all the
killers of Muslim civilians (say, Afghan wedding parties) and of fighters for
organizations explicitly invoking Islam, have praised Islam to the skies and
refrained from criticizing Islam or giving any quarter to critics of Islam.
When a Western politician starts praising Islam, Muslims had better seek
shelter.

One of the striking things about these
Islamophile leaders is their breath-taking pretentiousness. Whereas IS
commander Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a doctor of Islamic Studies, Islamophiles
like Cameron with his pompous “monsters, not Muslims” statement are simply
zeroes in Islamic theology and law. Al-Baghdadi can win hands down in any
dispute before an Islamic court. Everything IS has become notorious for, from
kidnappings and rapes through slave-takings to executions of dissidents and
unbelievers, has been prefigured in Mohammed’s own conduct. The new Caliph knows
that the cornerstone of Islamic law, recognized by every single Islamic
jurisconsult or judge, is the Prophet’s precedent behaviour. What Cameron is
saying, effectively comes down to asserting that “Mohammed was non-Muslim”, or
even: “Mohammed was a monster”. Mind you, I have not said it, but the British
Prime Minister has implied it.

Media
bias

The media, in their vast majority committed
to shielding Islam from criticism, will connect the dots in a simplistic and
thoroughly wrong manner. They report on the frequent killings of Muslims by Western
soldiers and drones, and on the other they promote and highlight the thoroughly
false notion of Islamophobia, so they pontificate that “Islamophobia has caused
increasing international violence against Muslims”. On the contrary, Islamophilia
is the professed conviction of the leaders who kill Muslims. By contrast, critics
of Islam like Raimundus Lullus, Voltaire, the late Sita Ram Goel, Daniel Pipes,
Robert Spencer, including ex-Muslims like the late Anwar Sheikh, Taslima
Nasrin, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan, have never
harmed a single Muslim. Even mass-murderer Anders Breivik, the darling and
lonely trump card of the Islamophiles, strengthens our case: while not actively
an Islam critic, he was at least a quoter of Islam critics (though he reckoned
his own act would be used by the Islamophiles to discredit them by association,
which he considered good as he wanted to eliminate the “illusion” of reasonable
and democratic methods in favour of the violent option) and the killer of 77
people, but he had spurned the easy option of throwing a bomb into a full
mosque and instead pointed his machine
gun at juvenile multiculturalists of the Norwegian Labour Party. So, even his
grisly case confirms that Islam critics don’t kill Muslims while Islamophiles
do.

This applies even to India: Jawaharlal
Nehru presided over the state that was forced to wage war with Pakistan over
Kashmir in 1947-8, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Atal Behari Vajpayee faced down Pakistani
invasion in 1965 c.q. 1999, and Indira Gandhi waged the Bangladesh war in 1971,
killing many Pakistani Muslims in the process; yet none of them can be quoted
as ever criticizing Islam, while some if not all of them have actually praised
Islam. For none of the Western or Indian leaders concerned, it can credibly be
argued that they didn’t mean what they said in favour of Islam. All of them had
to operate in and were groomed by a climate of Islamophilia. Both the so-called
“secularists” in India and the multiculturalists in the West combat and
criminalize any sign of Islam criticism. Even the “Hindu nationalist” party BJP,
to which Vajpayee belonged, has never criticized Islam. Those numerous
secularists who allege that the BJP hates islam are welcome to quote a
statement of that tendency from the BJP party paper; I at least have never seen
one.

Every single medium considers itself an
objective vantage-point from which to evaluate all the other media. So, they
all say that “the media” except themselves are anti-Islamic and spread a
negative view of Islam. This is another make-believe: the media are not
anti-Islamic by any means, they shield Islam from criticism as much as they can
and they impose on all inconvenient facts about Islamic movements the best
possible spin. Yet it is true that nonetheless, the media do spread a negative
view of Islam in spite of themselves, viz. in their raw reporting. What impact
does a newspaper editorial in praise of Islam have, when the next page reports
on kidnappings and forced conversions by Boko Haram or slave-takings and
beheadings by the Caliphate? The public knows by now that “haram” and
“caliphate” are Islamic terms. It can read for itself that the first thing Boko
Haram did with the kidnapped girls was to forcibly convert them to Islam;
clearly they are not “monsters without religion”. So the negative influence of
the media on the public’s perception of Islam is not due to media bias, on the
contrary, it is only due to reality peeping through in the news reports.

Casus
belli

The Islamophile leaders do not just happen
to kill Muslims, both fighters and civilians (“collateral damage”), they do so
specifically for Islamophile reasons. According to US Foreign Secretary John
Kerry, one of the reasons for sending bomber airplanes to Iraq to fight IS, is
to eliminate the “distortion of Islam”. In reality, the Islamic State is giving
a truthful picture of what Islamic doctrine stands for. It emulates the
Prophet’s behaviour, a model for all Muslims. Not just the “fanatics” but all
deliberate Muslims sanctify the Prophet as the “perfect man”. So, no distortion
there. Yet, Islamophiles propagate the notion that “IS is not the true Islam”. They
like to drown the fish by claiming that there are many schools of Islam; but
none can show us an Islamic school where it is taught that “Mohammed was
wrong”.

Publicity-conscious Muslims have even tried
to support them by issuing a statement condemning IS. Here
at last was proof from the horse’s mouth that the real Islam is a religion of
peace after all; or is something wrong with this idyllic picture? Caliph
al-Baghdadi will have no trouble repudiating this statement in a court of
Islamic law nor in the court of reason. For instance, among the reasons cited
why IS does not live up to the standards of real Islam, is its practice of
slavery. But it is easy to show that Mohammed took and sold slaves, and that
Mohammed took a captive Jewish woman into his harem after massacring her male
family members. IS’s practice of enslaving non-Muslims, selling them or using
them for sexual gratification is nothing but an emulation of Mohammed’s model
behaviour, by definition valid in Islamic law. What the Muslim spokesmen are
saying, or at least what they want the silly Islamophiles to believe, is that
Mohammed himself was a bad Muslim, a “monster”. The abolition of slavery was
imposed from outside on the Muslim world, principally by Britain, and was not
abolished in the Arabic heartland of Islam until 1962. The peculiar institution
was only reluctantly done away with in Muslim society, and the Caliphate is
merely reviving an institution intrinsic to Islam – as the authors of this
statement fully well know. But they have no second thoughts about fooling the non-Muslim
Islamophiles, especially because these are only eager to be duped.

The situation now is that pious Muslims (not
“monsters” but pious Muslims) are being killed by the bombers of Islamophile
President Barack Obama and his equally Islamophile allies. Thus, Belgian Defence
Minister Pieter De Crem, who sent six bomber aircraft to Iraq, also parroted
the line that “IS terrorists have nothing to do with Islam”: the same
combination of Islamophilia by conviction with Muslim-killing in reality. Also
among the victims are the Yezidi women being used as sex slaves, the Assyrians
and Yezidis who formally converted to Islam to save their lives, as well as
numerous cases of the fabled “moderate Muslim” among the civilians of the
region. Islamophiles have a lot of blood on their hands.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.